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Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it’s just to say I cared enough.
I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.
What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?
agriculture, another word for cultivation of land, for making something out of dirt.
Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What I know now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each morning and recognize my own flesh, for this one thing she made— me—to remain how she intended, for one of us to make it out unscathed.
more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy–colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me.
I can’t help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.
LOVE POEM WITH APOLOGIES FOR MY APPEARANCE Sometimes, I think you get the worst of me. The much-loved loose forest-green sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk, but it’s different than that. I move in this house with you, the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me than much else. I’m wrong,
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Even now, I’m older, time’s crypt and wish curl around me like ghost wind.
Time does that. The arrow we ride into the now, then into the future, does not pull out of the skin backward. Or does it? The past is happening.
Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.
My memoir could be called I Thought I Wanted a Baby but All I Got Was Your Dead Ex-Girlfriend’s Two Old Cats.
